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Parte de um capítulo do magnífico livro de Marshal Berman, All that is solid melts into air (existe tradução portuguesa):

"Loss of a Halo" (Paris Spleen #46, written in 1865 but rejected by the press and not published until after Baudelaire's death) develops as a dialogue between a poet and an "ordinary man" who bump into each other in un mauvais lieu, a disreputable or sinister place, probably a brothel, to the embar­rassment of both. The ordinary man, who has always cherished an exalted idea of the artist, is aghast to find one here:

"What! you here, my friend? you in a place like this? you, the eater of ambrosia, the drinker of quintessences! I'm amazed!"

The poet then proceeds to explain himself:

"My friend, you know how terrified I am of horses and vehicles? Well, just now as I was crossing the boulevard in a great hurry, splashing through the mud, in the midst of a moving chaos, with death galloping at …

Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality. The true substance of whatever I feel is absolutely incommunicable, and the more pro­foundly I feel it, the more incommunicable it is. In order to convey to someone else what I feel, I must translate my feelings into his language - saying things, that is, as if they were what I feel, so that he, reading them, will feel exactly what I felt. And since this someone is presumed by art to be not this or that person but everyone (i.e., that person common to all persons), what I must finally do is convert my feelings into a typical human feeling, even if it means perverting the true nature of what I felt.
Abstract things are hard to understand, because they don't easily command the reader's attention, so I'll use a simple example to make my abstractions concrete. Let's suppose that, for some reason or other (which might be that I'm …

She had too much so with a smile you took some.Of everything she had you hadAbsolutely nothing, so you took some.At first, just a little.

Still she had so much she made you feelYour vacuum, which nature abhorred,So you took your fill, for nature's sake.Because her great luck made you feel unluckyYou had redressed the balance, which meantNow you had some too, for yourself.As seemed only fair. Still her ambitionClaimed the natural right to screw you upLike a crossed-out page, tossed into a basket.Somebody, on behalf of the gods,Had to correct that hubris.A little touch of hatred steadied the nerves.

Everything she had won, the happiness of it,You collectedAs your compensationFor having lost. Which left her absolutelyNothing. Even her life wasTrapped in the heap you took. She had nothing.Too late you saw what had happened.It made no difference that she was dead.Now that you had all she had ever hadYou had much too much. Only youSaw her smile, …

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